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To the Lighthouse

The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again." — Greta Gerwig

The authorized, original edition of one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century: a miraculous novel of family, love, war, and mortality, with a foreword from Eudora Welty.

From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and conflict between men and women.

To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There's the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. With the lighthouse excursion postponed, Woolf shows the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life that seemingly could go on forever.

But as time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and together, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

A moving portrait in miniature of family life, To the Lighthouse also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.

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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from July 28, 2008
      British actress Juliet Stevenson makes for a better reader of Woolf's words than Nicole Kidman's Oscar-winning turn as Woolf in The Hours
      . Stevenson carefully sorts through Woolf's famously tangled modernist masterpiece about the interior lives of a well-to-do British family, and the ways in which the First World War permanently damaged European society. She reads in an amplified hush, her exaggeratedly formal British diction adding poignancy to the sense of dislocation and disorder that marks the book's transition from pre- to postwar. Her reading is quietly, carefully precise, and that precision is a solid complement to Woolf's own measured, inward-looking prose.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 6, 2006
      It's wondrous to listen to a fine reading of a long-loved novel. Leishman makes masterly use of volume, timbre and resonance to distinguish between characters and draw us into the emotional swings and vibrations of the internal musings of each. She creates not a new but a more nuanced reading, following the interwoven streams of consciousness in a British English that lends authenticity to each voice. Leishman swims smoothly through Woolf's sentences that ebb and flow with numerous parenthetical thoughts and fresh images. These passages are interspersed with quick, sharp, simple sentences that gain strength in contrast. Leishman also draws our attention to Woolf's poetic prose: her rhythms and images, her use of hard consonants in monosyllabic words in counterpoint to long, soft, dreamy words and phrases. To The Lighthouse
      plays back and forth between telescopic and microscopic views of nature and human nature. Mrs. Ramsey is both trapped in and pleased in her roles as wife, mother and hostess. The introspective Mr. Ramsey is consumed with his legacy of long-since-published abstract philosophy. This is a book that cannot be read—or heard—too often.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • ATOS Level:7.2
  • Lexile® Measure:1030
  • Interest Level:9-12(UG)
  • Text Difficulty:6-8

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